James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

The screaming that had come from another part of the subterranean area had stopped about two hours ago. Briefly, Anton had seen a tall, mustached man in a suit and a soiled white shirt carrying a medical bag. He had studiously avoided looking at her, his shoulders rounded, the back of his head turned to her, his uncut hair hanging over his collar like a tangle of twigs. To someone else, he had said, “I have left you the hypodermics. That is all I will do. I have seen nothing here. I am going back to my bed.”

She heard an upstairs door open and feet descending the steps. So far, her captors had not spoken to her without their masks. The man who was approaching her did not wear a mask; he wore elevated shoes, a white sport coat, a monogrammed lavender shirt unbuttoned below the collar, and black slacks. His nose was hooked, the nostrils thick with hair, his cheeks slathered with whiskers, the exposed top of his chest gnarled with tiny bones. He unlocked the cell door with an iron key and pulled it open and came inside the room, wiping the rust off his fingers with a handkerchief. His breath smelled of decay and seemed to reach out and touch her face like wet cobweb. “Frank doesn’t like you,” he said. “He says you spat on him. He says that’s the second time you’ve done it.”

“He tried to take my clothes off.”

“He shouldn’t have done that. I’ll talk to him about it. Sit down.” When she didn’t respond, he beamed and said, “Please. Don’t make everything unpleasant. You remember me?”

“No,” she said, sitting down.

“I helped provide the AK-47s you and your friends shipped to Nicaragua.”

“I dealt with many undesirables. I suspect you were among them.”

“I’ve always wanted to talk with you on a personal level. You are quite famous. Do you want something to eat?”

“Yes.”

“I knew we could be friends.”

“You’re Josef Sholokoff. You were at my house when your men almost drowned me.”

“Maybe.”

“You killed Cody Daniels in the cruelest way a man can die.”

“The cowboy minister? He was of no importance. Why are you worried about him? You should be thinking about yourself. We’re going to put you on the phone with Sheriff Holland.” He was still grinning, his eyes so bright and intense and merry that they were impossible to read. “One way or another, you’ll get on the phone. Or you will be heard on the phone. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

“No,” she replied, looking straight ahead.

“You heard the man screaming earlier this morning. He was talking on the phone to Sheriff Holland. He just didn’t know it.”

“Is he still alive?”

“He might be, if his heart didn’t give out. I’ll check and see. Do you want to meet him?”

“Where is Krill?”

“These are insignificant people. Why do you keep dwelling on them?”

“I think you’re evil. You’re not just a man who does evil. You love evil for its own sake. I’ve known a few like you. Not many, but some.”

“With the Khmer Rouge?”

“No, the Khmer Rouge were uneducated peasants who were bombed by B-52s. You’re different. I suspect your cruelty is your means to hide your cowardice.”

“And you? You didn’t rain fire on people who lived in grass huts?”

“I did.”

“But I’m evil?”

“You don’t plan for me to leave here, not alive, at least. Take your lies and your deceit from the room. You’re odious in the sight of God and man, Mr. Sholokoff. I suspect your role as a pornographer allows you to feel powerful about women. But in any woman’s eyes, you would be looked upon with pity. Your fetid breath and your physical repulsiveness are simply an extension of the blackness in your heart. Any woman who is not of diminished capacity would immediately be aware of that and want to flee your presence, no matter what she might tell you. Ask the people around you and see what their response is.”

He was clearly fighting to retain the merry light in his eyes and to keep his grin in place, but his mouth twitched slightly, and his nostrils were dilating. “Do you like my farm?”

“Why should I care one way or another about your farm?” she asked.

“Because it’s yours. Your permanent home. You will be among the people, part of the soil, fertilizer for their vegetables,” he replied. “What finer fate for a martyr of your stature?”

Preacher Jack Collins didn’t like to be pushed. Nor did he like losing control of things or, worse, having control taken from him. Not only had Noie Barnum, ingrate extraordinaire, strolled off from their safe house, he had managed to get himself arrested in a convenience store and put in a county bag that usually housed drunks and check writers and wife beaters. When Noie did not return from his stroll down the highway, Jack had gotten on his cell phone and begun making calls to an informational network that he had created and maintained for two decades, a network that no one would ordinarily associate with a man who dressed in beggar’s rags and wandered the desert like a Bedouin. It included hookers from El Paso to Austin, button men from both sides of the border, Murphy artists, street dips and stalls, shylocks, coyotes, second-story creeps, drug mules, corrupt Mexican cops, safecrackers, car boosters, money washers, fences of every stripe, and a morphine-addicted retired librarian in Houston who could probably find Jimmy Hoffa’s body if the FBI would take time to retain her.

It didn’t take long to discover what had happened. Noie had gotten pinched in the convenience store by the same deputy Preacher Jack had dug up from a premature burial. How about that for ingratitude? Then a snitch just getting out of the bag had spotted Noie in custody and dropped the dime on him with Josef Sholokoff’s people. Now several Mexicans were saying that a bunch of guys in camouflage masks had landed a helicopter at the Chinese woman’s place, murdered a man in front of a child, and abducted the Chinese woman and a half-breed.

Jack had no doubt who was behind the abduction. Josef Sholokoff wanted Noie Barnum in his possession. The quickest way to him was through the sheriff, and the quickest way to the sheriff was through Anton Ling.

At four A.M. the morning after the abduction, a man who was part albino and part black and who had pink eyes and hairless skin that resembled different shades of white rubber that had been stitched together delivered a new Toyota to Preacher Jack at a cafe just north of Ojinaga. “There’s another registration and another set of plates under the seat. I got you two driver’s licenses, too,” he said. He put the keys in Jack’s hand, his eyes holding steady on Jack’s.

“Anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare into somebody’s face?” Jack said.

“You’re hot.”

“You know a time when I wasn’t?”

“Not like this. I had a hard time on the driver’s licenses. Word is you popped an FBI agent.”

“He popped himself.”

“A photo guy I use says you’re the stink on shit and for me not to come back again.”

“You wouldn’t try to put the slide on me, would you, Billy?”

“Just telling you like it is.”

“You want more money?”

“I was thinking about visiting Baja. Maybe lie on the beach and cool out for a while.”

“What do you use for suntan lotion-ninety-weight motor oil?”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

Jack took three hundred dollars from his wallet and folded the bills between his fingers and stuffed them in the man’s shirt pocket. “A metaphor means comparing one thing in terms of another without using the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’ ‘To lie on a beach’ is not a metaphor. If I said to you, ‘Tell your parents to buy a better quality of condoms,’ I would be making an implication, but I would not be speaking metaphorically. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”